"It is
not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all
the crimes committed in our name. It's not at all right that
you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to
your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of
yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you
did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted
whether such things could be true; but now you know, and
still you hold your tongues." -- Paul Rockwell

Layla
Anwar is the pseudonym for an Iraqi blogger, in her early to
mid-forties, who appears to be writing directly from Baghdad, right in
the line of fire, so to speak. She comes from a secular, upper-middle
class, Sunni background and remains loyal to Saddam Hussein. Unlike the
blogger Baghdad Burning, Layla does not write for the American left.
Rather, she writes to all Americans, including the American left, and
condemns us all along with the Bush-Cheney regime. She indicts every
single American for being a part of the destruction and devastation of
her motherland. She writes to the enemy.

Her blogs
are a blunt description of life in Baghdad in the time of war - a war of
American imperialism in its endless quest for natural resources. But
then again, this war is not limited to oil. War makes a handful of
people extremely rich and renders millions destitute or dead. The rich
elite are the scores of corporations and sub-contractors who receive
lavish contracts from the U.S. government – companies like Halliburton,
Blackwater, Monsanto, Citibank, Chase Morgan, AT&T and Bechtel - who
have all gone to Iraq to make millions in the work of “reconstruction”,
that is, reconstructing everything the U.S. bombed to the ground. So
this is an illegal war of aggression for the sake of plunder and profit.
The Nuremberg Trials called such wars the “supreme international crime.”

On July 5,
2007, Layla sends the readers “A Postcard from Iraq.” It is the height
of irony. Her words, while describing the tyranny and agony of war, are
riddled with sarcasm. She outdoes the entire world in sarcasm to make
her point, to get it into the heads of the readers what is happening in
Iraq. First she reminds us of her two relatives, Kamal and Omar, who
were kidnapped and imprisoned in “detention centers.” Then she tells us
about Salam, another relative, who was kidnapped and beaten to a pulp.
And a few days before writing this entry, it happened to Raouf. Raouf is
not his real name. But she gives him the name “Raouf” because in Arabic
it means “kind spirited, gentle.” She tells us that Raouf is a gentle
soul who loves “poetry, arts, animals, the land… which he cultivated
with great care and love.” One day he leaves Baghdad to check on his
small plot of land an hour’s drive away in the country. He wants to
check if his fruit trees, birds and chickens are all right. But, just a
few hours after reaching there, men come and take him away. They keep
him for three days and torture him non-stop. Layla writes, “They used
iron rods, chains, rubber hoses, sticks… Sometimes the three pounded him
in unison. Sometimes they would take turns. The only respite he had is
when they stopped for ‘prayers’!” Due perhaps to the constant phone
contact between his torturers and Raouf’s wife, they finally drop him on
the road. They do not kill him. He walks for miles until he reaches
home. Externally he lives. But internally he has died. Layla sends us
all a “Postcard from Iraq” to tell us his story, to tell us the reality
that is Iraq.

On July 9,
2007 Layla writes “Some Thoughts on Forgiveness.” She asks the
question, how to forgive when the abuse, humiliation, destruction,
devastation, torture, rape and annihilation continue? There needs to be
some time out, she says. There must be a break from the hell of
imperialist torture of the Iraqi people. But there is never any break.
Christ was crucified just once. But we, the invaders, are crucifying
Layla and her country daily, without end. And even if she could forgive
us, she says, She, Iraq, will never forgive us. The dead fish and
floating corpses in the Tigris and Euphrates will not forgive us. The
burned down palm trees, the ancient ruins, the toxic waste and crumbled
roofs will not forgive us. Layla says, don’t ask me for forgiveness. Ask
Iraq.

In another
blog entry, “Add’o’holic”, written on July 29, 2007, Layla talks about
numbers. She makes so many calculations for us, the reader - the reader
who cannot see the horror that is Iraq. She wants us to see the horror,
to grasp it. This time, she tries by using numbers. She has lists of
the dead, and lists of the imprisoned in Adhamiya concentration camp,
Al’ Ameriya concentration camp, and the Yarmook, Karrada, Amil, Mansur,
and Taji ghettos. She has lists of the tortured, the exiled and the
disappeared. All these lists are in her head. Then she has lists of all
the sick, lists of the unemployed, and the emotionally traumatized. The
lists in total include all her family members, relatives and friends.
And then it also includes their family members, relatives and friends.
It includes everyone, she says, except the hookers in the Green Zone.
Killed are 2.7 million (500,000 children), 2.2 million in exile (2,500
per day), 2.2 million internally displaced, so 2.7 million slaughtered
and 4.9 million refugees. Subtract that from 25 million Iraqi population
and you have 20 million (rounded off). She calls it genocide. She
reminds us that when the same events took place in Rwanda, the U.S.
called it genocide. But today, in Iraq, the U.S. government calls it
democracy and freedom.

On August
7, 2007, Layla writes another blog entry called “Why is Half of Iraq in
Absolute Poverty?” From the very beginning, she indicts the reader,
that is, the American people. She says, “What does it say about you?
What does it say about your countries? What does it say about your
institutions? What does it say about your governments, your ‘culture’,
your ‘civilization’, your history, your ‘progress’, your ‘values’, your
concepts … ?“ She just keeps asking the reader, why? The reader is
caught. She says, if only 5 million of you had protested in front of the
White House or 10 Downing Street, the war could have been stopped. The
context, the raison d’etre for all her blogs, is the war, the horrors of
war. The intended audience is not other Arabs. The intended audience is
the perpetrators of war, that is, the Americans. It is either the men in
blue suits who give the orders for soldiers to go to Iraq and rape,
torture, sodomize and kill the simple civilians of Iraq, or the soldiers
who carry out these crimes, or the entire nation of 301 million
Americans, who by their silence are as guilty as the soldiers who
slaughter, and as guilty as the men in blue suits and black hearts
sitting in the White House, giving the orders to kill while having
coffee and donuts. Saddam Hussein gave speeches, but they were to his
own people and the people of neighboring countries. Layla Anwar takes on
a far more difficult task, a far more hostile audience. She directs her
blog at the enemy, the occupier, the torturer, the rapist, the destroyer
of her motherland. The difference is that she is using the internet,
which means her potential audience is the entire world. Second, her
rhetoric remains uploaded. It is not a speech that is heard one evening
on the news and then gone forever. Her blog entries are all there
staring us in the face. Her unbounded rage, her seething and swearing,
is right in our face whenever we visit her blog.

In each
and every blog entry, Layla Anwar wants desperately for us, the reader,
the American, and whoever else collaborates with us, to grasp the horror
that is Iraq. We cannot grasp it from Fox News. Fox News will prefer to
report on Paris Hilton’s release from jail or Britney Spears’ latest
custody hearing, or worse yet, Barack and Hillary. We cannot grasp it
from Senate hearings on C-span because it is unbearably
intellectualized, complexitized, and justified, with terms like
“collateral damage” not even mentioned or, if at all mentioned, never
clearly defined as drill holes in the bodies of young men, burned up
corpses of beautiful 14-year-old girls by US soldiers to destroy the
evidence of rape, or sodomization of 12 year old boys by US soldiers in
Abu Ghraib and twenty other prisons throughout Iraq. We never hear about
those twenty other prisons, do we. In fact, today there is complete
silence of goings on in Abu Ghraib. Some say that nothing has changed;
the torture, the rapes, the sodomizing continue. The only difference
today is that no cameras are allowed. It is a policy of “hide the
evidence of U.S. war crimes.” So with no cameras, no pictures, complete
censorship of the reality of war, and instead constant TV coverage of
American Idol (70 million Americans watched the finals in 2007), how
then will the American people grasp the utter brutality of war,
particularly when the present generation never went through a war and
their great great grandfathers are not here to tell them the horrors
that took place in the American Civil War? The final proof of that
brutality is 120 suicides per week by returning veterans. They cannot
cope with the guilt.

By the
grace of God, Layla says, they had no drills for Raouf. When he returned
to them,

“Raouf was
so badly tortured, he was unrecognizable. You cannot see his eyes
anymore. His face, his nose, are so swollen, as if about to explode with
pain and hurt. His body, his body, the marks of a thousand rods,
chains, sticks on it. His legs, his back, his chest, his arms, his
stomach… His white shirt was dark brown with blood. Someone took
pictures. For the memory, for the record, for the family album. An Iraqi
family album. … It is a miracle they did not kill him. It is a miracle
they did not drill him …”

The
torture of Raouf is living proof of the horror of US imperialist war in
Iraq. Is further proof needed? In the blog “Add’o’holic” Layla provides
more proof. She provides statistics. But statistics are just numbers on
a page, aren’t they. It is not the same as reading about the beastly
torture of one man named Raouf.

We learn
more about the logos of Layla Anwar In “Why is Half of Iraq in Absolute
Poverty?” Layla quotes a BBC radio show, which in turn quotes an Oxfam
report stating that over 70 percent of Iraqis no longer have access to
clean drinking water. Before 2003, all Iraqis had water to drink. The
same Oxfam report stated that today more than 50 percent of Iraqis are
malnourished and one out of three Iraqis is starving. Fifty percent live
in abject poverty. She provides more numbers for us. Ninety-two percent
of Iraqi children have learning impediments due to mental trauma. And
ninety-nine percent of Iraqi children are traumatized for life. The
logic, the statistics are all documented in the Oxfam report.

In the
blog “Some Thoughts on Forgiveness,” she explains very simply that the
predator is still in her country, still killing, torturing, plundering,
raping and sodomizing her people. The reality of the continuation of
imperialist occupation cannot be disputed by anyone. Hence, does the
question of forgiveness arise?

The ethos,
the moral character of Layla Anwar is unknown. She lives in Baghdad,
thousands of miles away from America, and as per internet norm, it is
unlikely that we will ever meet her. We cannot know in detail about her
character. We know from other blog entries that in her helpless,
hopeless rage, she does not hesitate to tell the reader at regular
intervals, “Fuck you all.” We know from reading more of her blog that
she is a highly educated, literate and articulate woman. Frankly, in
this particular context, the assessment of the moral character of Layla
Anwar borders on criminal in comparison to the mighty crimes and
tortures being committed on Layla herself, on all her family members and
their family members, on the entire population of Iraq, on the rivers,
the date palms and soil of Iraq. What right does the critic, any
critic, have to discuss the moral character of Layla Anwar in view of
the American imperialist occupation of her country with all the
suffering that inflicts on her people?

Pathos is
pervasive in Arab Woman Blues. No other Arab, man or woman, appeals to
the conqueror, the occupier, the invader, the rapist, with the depth and
the agony that Layla Anwar appeals. She spews wrath and fury at us all
for bringing such colossal destruction to her people. But sometimes she
appeals. Perhaps in every human being, even in the worst of
circumstances, in the nadir point of their existence, the flame of hope
continues to feebly flicker. She recounts how Raoul’s wife begs and begs
his captors to please release her husband. And then she writes,

“So when some bastard writes to me calling me a ‘negative,
whining, dram queen’ because am not using my ‘talents’ to ‘uplift’ the
arrogant western minds into ‘Forgiveness and Beauty’ – Notice how the
occupier asks the occupied to uplift him/her! I offer this postcard
from Iraq instead of my usual ‘whining’… Yes, take it all and forget
about us. Just forget us … and let us breathe a little. For it hurts to
breathe, really hurts to breathe in Iraq.”

Layla
never ceases indicting the reader. In “Add’o’holic” she again throws
the numbers in our faces:

“700,000
killers roaming around. 1 for every 30. The biggest army in the world.
The No. 1 army in the world. Sophisticated, developed, techno-logically
advanced, surge after surge…applying “professional Darwinism” as one of
your Senior officers likes to call it. And four years down the line,
with its logistic support teams, its soldiers, its militias, its
contractors, its mercenaries, its peshmergas, it has not been able to
control and secure one neighbourhood, not one alley way, not one street
corner.... Now what do you call that? I call that DEFEAT. Some of you
think of Defeat the Hollywood way. Like soldiers head bent down, with
bags packed walking away into the sunset. That is the movies, Dears.
DEFEAT is when you have at least 700,000 assholes working for you and
you keep increasing their numbers and you still can’t make it. See what
I mean? Now the flip side of defeat is RESISTANCE. Four years down the
line, if you do not call that RESISTANCE, I do not know what is. And you
are supposedly the No. 1 army in the world. You can surge all you want,
bring in all the mercenaries in the world, pay trillions and trillions
of dollars, hire every contractor possible, wheel and deal with every
enemy you like, make pacts with militias, thugs, drillers, torturers,
snipers … You are DEFEATED.” Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, that is called
RESISTANCE.”

In “Why is
Half of Iraq in Absolute Poverty?”, Layla continues her relentless
indictment of the American people:

So I ask
you again – why? What have Iraqis done to you? Did they invade you? Did
they steal your homes? Did they imprison you? Did they torture you? Did
they rape you? Did they occupy your lands? Of course, some of you will
come and present me with your usual condescending, paternalistic,
patronizing lists of political theories, attempting to explain the
inexplicable. Save your time and energy… I know all about your theories
of imperialism, neo-cons… I also know all about your handy explanations
regarding oil, cartels, monopolies, globalization. None of that
satisfies me. I still need to know why? Why us? Why Iraq? Why this? Why
now? If you fail to answer that question, then you would have not
learned one single thing about yourselves. And I say yourselves because
your governments are a reflection of who you are, your aspirations, your
mindsets, your thinking, your illusions. You are part of it and it is
part of you. And I can see right now there are nothing but murderous
thoughts – yours…I don’t care for your ‘yes buts’. I truly don’t. And
that applies to all of you. All of you whose governments have a finger
in the Iraq pie.

If you had
really wanted, you could have easily gone en masse, in front of your
government’s offices … if only 5 million of you, not more, only 5
million, had done that and had thrown your passports in a huge bonfire
in front of your White House, 10 Downing Street or wherever the hell you
happen to be, then I am sure, we would not be experiencing what we are
experiencing now.”

Layla both
pleads and condemns without ceasing. The emotional appeal is there, but
it is a double-edged sword. Many Americans cannot tolerate the
indictment and curse her blog. Others, like myself, already understand
the crimes of American Empire and feel those crimes only more acutely
when reading her entries. In pondering the millions of tears flowing in
Iraq, Layla’s searing indictments just leave my face covered in tears.
Her radicalism causes readers to either love her or hate her. She is no
centrist. She is a radical, and sometimes, history remembers the
radicals of this world.

She begins
slowly, casually, with a flippant comment as if speaking to the wind
outside her house. But then she begins to insert the searing intensity
of her own character, throwing more and more statistics in our face,
naming more and more varieties of torture, talking about this rape and
that rape of her Iraqi sisters, and asking over and over, why? It will
not be possible to forget that question, along with her hundreds of
other questions, to the occupiers. She begins, almost sweetly
sometimes, but with the bitterest of ironies, describing the gentle
Raouf, his lands and gardens, birds and animals, and then she reaches
the climax of his torture followed by the slaughter of his soul. And we
are the cause of that slaughter, we are the cause of all the suffering
in her country. We stand indicted again and again. We are the invading
imperial army, we are the shallow, indifferent Americans living an easy,
comfy life back in America. Who would forgive us? Is there anyone who
would forgive an army for its invasion, with all the rapes, tortures,
crimes and genocides that invariably accompany every invasion in
history?

Layla’s
delivery is abusive, derisive and denigrating. She is highly articulate
in the English language, and she uses words to humiliate the occupiers
to the maximum. She uses every word to shame us, to compel us to put
our faces to the ground. She asks us:

Will Iraq
ever forgive you? I am the wrong person to ask forgiveness from. Ask
Her. But before you ask Her, stop doing what you are doing. You cannot
continue in your ways and ask for forgiveness. It is simply not
possible. In the meantime, She will continue driving you out by the same
equal sheer force that you have used on Her. Read Her history and you
will know. And trust me, you will come begging for Her mercy.”

Now is not
the time to worry about Layla’s abuse. It is the time to worry about the
crimes of Empire on innocent peoples around the world. We also cannot
forget the people of Afghanistan or the people of Iran, whom Cheney is
just itching to slaughter. We need to step outside the imperialist
American box, and face her questions like a man, find the answers, and
then write to Layla and beg for forgiveness. And then we need to do
everything possible on the ground to stop the endless serial wars waged
by our government.

__________________

Garda
Ghista is a freelance journalist, author and Founding President of the
World Prout Assembly, a movement dedicated to transferring political and
economic power from the corporations to the common people.

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